Boulder Dude said:

It was...very.

I kept tryint to finish off all of my toons christmas missions. Dubh was the last one, and the jerk kept crashing the server while I was in the mission. So...I spent the evening over on Virtue and got 19 up to 17th.

Avocet said:

Oh, it was frustrating, all right. Three quartewrs of the way through an arduous mission, we see red letters pop up in our chat windows. "No! They're taking the servers down NOW??? Wait..."

The message wasn't the "Emergency Maintenance" one we had seen earlier for the hotfix.

"[Admin] Since I've decided to have some fun and crash your server, I might as well give you somewhere to whine. {URL deleted} This is actually kind of fun, suprise me."

So some guy had found a way to spoof an admin address and was going to spam messages, we figured. Sure enough, we got another one.

[Admin] Again, that url is city.xpt.net, and please prepare for crashing.

Annoying, but still not a major problem. Then:

[Admin] 01100101012.

And that was followed by a pop-up informing us that he had forcibly disconnected us from the server. And he had. Champion came back up a few minutes later, and we restarted the mission. Only to have "Admin" tell us he was taking requests, and then that he had received a "personal request" to "do it again." Which he did.

I read the official boards for an hour or so, until it turned into a flame war over whether over whether or not account info was jeopardized. (Keen Edge's player was trying to mollify people who were foolish enough to go to the URL the hacker had given us.) Then I went back in and played some more. I was soloing, because the other players didn't bother coming back. No more shutdowns while I was on, but he did tell us to Google for the widely-available tool he was apparently using to manage his mischief.

All in all, not the best night to be playing on Champion or, it seems, Protector.

Boulder Dude said:

Ok...tonight between 9:30 and 1am (yay...no work tomorrow), it was going down every 20 mintues on average. Thankfully it was Ted's Christmas party, and not missions.

Avocet said:

Yes. On only one of those occasions did I get the now-dreaded "You have been forcibly disconnected from the server" box, causing me to wonder if we were being hacked again. Clearly, the hotfix the other day did not solve the problem.

I was glad i amde it to the party, though. Avo got to show off his new birthday present, which even Cally didn't heckle him about. You guys all know that Avo and I share a birthday, right? (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

Avocet said:

In the wee hours of the morning, the devs posted this.

"Just wanted to take a moment to let you know that we're currently experiencing some short, intermittent connectivity issues that are requiring a server reset to resolve. We apologize for any loss of connectivity to the game that you might be experiencing as a result of this. Please note that our technical teams are aware and hope to have these issues resolved soon. In the meantime, as always, we appreciate your patience and understanding. "

I'm currently downloading a 2.5 GB patch which promises that they "Increased Server Stability. " Let's hope it was increased sufficiently this time.

Oh, they've also removed the Prestige reward for grabbing a Christmas present. Merry Christmas, folks!